Manufacturing is Alive and Well in SC, Much to the Surprise of CNN
In April of this year, the Cable News Network came to South Carolina to do a story on the disappearance of the blue collar worker. What they found instead was ADEX Machining Technologies, one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, according to Inc. Magazine. At a time when other companies are downsizing, ADEX has grown over 300% in the past 3 years, and hired over a dozen new employees. CNN was so impressed that they changed the focus of their story to celebrate ADEX and “The New Face of Blue Collar.” *
So how does ADEX manage to succeed in today’s economy when so many other companies are struggling? Two components play a key role – the specialized niche markets they supply, and the customized training incentives provided by readySC™.
ADEX, which stands for Aerospace, Defense and Energy Excellence, focuses on the emerging markets that inspired its name. “These markets employ use of more advanced materials,” said Jason Premo, Co-owner of ADEX. “They require high tech technology and a more highly skilled workforce. They represent an opportunity for continued growth while a lot of other industries are challenged with off-shoring.”
What makes ADEX unique is its ability to perform complex machining of advanced materials such as titanium and Inconel. This requires extremely tight tolerances. “The analogy that I use is that a dollar bill is .004 thick,” Premo explained. “The tolerances we deal with are 10 times thinner. So it’s really tolerances that you can’t see, and that demands the most in advanced technology and workforce training. You really have to have the best, most highly skilled people to be able to operate advanced, multi-million dollar equipment and be able to provide the customer that level of quality.”
The CNN segment talked about how ADEX employees represent the “new blue collar worker,” as Premo explained. “There’s a lot of discussion about the knowledge economy and the knowledge worker, and that’s really where we’re going. Companies like Boeing and BMW require a network of strong suppliers to maintain low inventory, speed to market and the quality they need to service their customers. So what that’s done is put a completely different level of demand and requirements of the associates on the floor. They have to be more involved, more empowered, more skilled – they have to be able to make decisions on the floor rather than the traditional kind of worker/supervisor type of relationship.” In fact ADEX associates don’t just run the machines on the plant floor, they also sit at a computer in the front office and design the parts themselves.
Helping to enhance the skills of this unique workforce is readySC™, South Carolina’s economic incentive for new and expanding industry. Premo and Co-owner Sean Witty first heard about readySC™ from the Chamber of Commerce and Greenville Technical College. “It’s challenging for small companies to work on a lot of the internal development needed because we don’t have a lot of the internal resources or the budgets of a typical Fortune 500 company,” Premo acknowledged. “So in learning what readySC™ has to offer, we’ve been leveraging the resources they provide for free to companies like ourselves, in training our leadership team, for our associates on the factory floor, to help offset the cost of hiring new high-skilled employees. There’s a lot of cost involved, and readySC™ has helped us grow and actually create more jobs faster than we would have on our own.”
Premo continued, “It’s helped us hire more aggressively than we would have been able to on our own because of some of the financial offsets that readySC™ is able to do to reimburse and incent companies like us to grow.”
In addition to the training provided by readySC™, ADEX is also taking advantage of other South Carolina training incentives provided by Greenville Technical College and Apprenticeship Carolina™.
“We have a few apprentices in the factory – a couple are full-time, and a couple are part-time work study associates that are still in Greenville Tech,” said Premo. “SC offers a nationally recognized apprenticeship program that enables a manufacturer to tailor a program to meet the specific needs of the manufacturer verses a one-size fits all approach. For us, we’re leveraging the curriculum that Greenville Tech already offers through its machine tool technology program. What that does is provide a formal methodology rather than the ‘tribal knowledge’ training approach that a lot of companies use. We’re able to put our associates through a system – modules of training – so that they work towards an end goal. We hope that more companies get involved and support it, because it really does work.”
Premo added that working with readySC™ and Apprenticeship Carolina™ has been very easy. “One thing we should emphasize is the ease of use of all these resources. A lot of companies don’t know that these resources are available, so we definitely need to bring more awareness. They’re very easy to use, they’re basically free – it’s really a great example of tax dollars at work. This is really working – it’s helping companies grow, become more competitive, create more jobs, and create more higher-wage jobs. You get access to really high quality people to help you develop and design systems and training to put in place. There are financial incentives as well so it definitely helps from a cost standpoint offset some of the budgetary issues that small companies typically have to deal with. I encourage manufactures to reach out to your local readySC™ resource and get educated. Have them come visit your factory and they’ll bring the resources. They’ll do all the work for you – all you have to do is commit to it.”
Premo summed up how important all these incentives are to ADEX’s business plan to become a premiere resource and supplier to growing markets in the Carolinas and the Southeast in the aerospace, defense, and power generation and energy sectors. “These are emerging markets that really mean a lot for our local economy. We really need to focus on these growth industries and support them in every way we can. That means investing in new equipment and technology, but most importantly, our workforce. Companies like Boeing won’t move to our state if they don’t have access to the people they need to run their company. You’ve got to have a skilled workforce. At ADEX we’re definitely very proud of our world class facility, but it’s nothing without the people. We’re not out to be the biggest supplier, but we want to be the best supplier for these emerging markets, and that requires the best employees that you can have. So we’re very dependent on resources like readySC™, our local technical colleges like Greenville Tech, and the support of our economic development community to enable us to reach those heights.”
*see CNN report
Watch the video of Jason Premo, Co-owner of ADEX
